In other articles, we’ve discussed how to load object relations using the auto-load and the one-step approach. Both of these approaches return a complex hierarchy of data where the parent object includes child entities at the time when it is retrieved from the server.

In this post, we continue our mission to build a restaurant to-go order app. So far we have put together UI mockups for the future Backendless application, and designed data schema for all the application’s data entities. At this point, we are very close to the coding part.

In another article, we described how to load complex data objects from the persistent storage using the “auto-load” technique. Using that approach, a developer can statically identify specific (child) properties that should be returned along with the parent object(s) when a client app sends a request to load them.

In another post, we describe how to add columns/properties to a Backendless table/class using Backendless Console. The types of properties reviewed in that post were all primitive: string, numbers, dates or boolean values. In addition to these data types, Backendless also supports relationships between objects stored in its persistent storage.

Previously we showed how to declare relationships between tables. Once a relationship is in place, specific objects stored in the tables may be linked with each other.

Another post covered how to retrieve data objects from Backendless. The code in that article loads a collection of the Restaurant objects and although it does not show it, the related collection of the Location objects arrives un-initialized. That is the default behavior of Backendless Database when it comes to loading related objects. The code…

In another post, we describe how data tables in Backendless map to the client-side classes whose instances contain persisted data objects. However, there are scenarios when the default mapping is undesirable. In that case, Backendless client libraries provide an API to override the mapping.

In another article, we wrote how to load the first object from a data table using API. For the purpose of symmetry (and out of common sense), there is also an API to load the last object from a data table in your Backendless Database. The last object is determined by the time when it is…

Data objects in Backendless can be connected to related properties not only in other tables, but also with Geopoints. These relationships may be declared programmatically or using Backendless Console. In this post, we will review the process of declaring a Data-to-Geo relationship in a data table schema.